Interview with Elena Leonova

You're listening to One Sharp Sword Cutting through to what Matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. Welcome to One Sharp Sword Cutting through to what Matters Most. I'm your host, Dr. Wayne Purnell, your host, your guide and your coach on this journey. Welcome. Today we have, today we have someone that's been doing a lot in platform product management. Now, you know, from the One Sharp Sword episodes you've been listening to and from this one that I bring on people in really unique industries, people that we wouldn't ordinarily go out and have these conversations about leadership with what is a platform product management? What is that and what's the leadership journey? Well, this is, it's, it's interesting because leadership is leadership is leadership and humanity is humanity is humanity. And so with me today to talk about, about her work in that I, I want to read a little bit about Elena Leonova. She's a global product executive and an Entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in leading digital commerce and platform and platform products. So she's worked at multiple companies that you may or may not have heard of and now she's building OneRank IO. This is a big deal. So she's got a book coming out and what we're going to be talking about is the what she's learned on her way in building scalable ecosystems and how to empower her developers and her partners in order to create value. So, Elena Leonova, welcome to One Sharp Sword.

Thank you so much for having me here.

So glad you're here. All right, well, let's jump in with what the heck is platform product stuff? What is it that you actually do? What is that? What does that mean? People know what it is to do banking, people know what it is to do. Dentistry. It's like people know what that is. Platform people even know logistics to a degree. Right. You order something and it gets lined up. Platform product management is sort of this. Unless you're in it, it's sort of this big broad term. So describe a little bit about what you do. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to wind the clock back and ask you how you got into doing that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, platform product management is something that you. Absolutely. Right. Not that many people actually know about. And I certainly didn't know that that's going to be my career path when I got into it. But we'll talk about that a little bit later. So what is platform product management? So ultimately, when you think about building technical products like Zoom that we're using for the video recording or Gmail, anything in Google infrastructure, like any of those technical products that we have, some of the products, they are tailored specifically for the end user like us, but some products are actually being built together with the ecosystem, meaning with partners and other companies that create value together. So, for example, when we think about iOS and what actually made Apple and iPhone so successful, it was not necessarily that Apple had everything figured out. It was the fact that they created an iPhone, but then also enabled all kind of those developers across the world to add all those additional apps that we are loving to use. And that's actually what creates this whole platform. Product management. So in a nutshell, the moment when you add somebody else to build value on your platform and deliver that together to your end customer, that type of product becomes a platform product. And that's exactly the type of work that I do.

You just described legos.

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.

So you have this big base on which Legos are built, and then your work is to create those links for the blocks that they could live uniquely. They work better when they are integrated with other platforms.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. When you think about Legos, it's one thing when you create all those different pieces, but then when there's so many different companies that created their own kits for. This is how you create a Hogwarts castle with Legos that created its own value versus kind of just giving the pieces of Legos to every customer.

That's great. So, I mean, it all starts with legos. It all starts with. For you, it all starts with, here's an app, and here's an app, and here's an app. But we all are sort of speaking the same language and you help to. To integrate that. Speaking of, of language, your, your accent is unique and I'd love to just kind of call it out. You're from the Ukraine. How'd you get here? How? Like you woke up when you one day and you said, you know what, I'm gonna move to the US and I'm going to do product platform management.

Platform, yeah. So. Well, the story has not been exactly that. So it never is.

Right? It never, never like the straight trajectory. So, so what, what is your story? How'd you get here? What was it that. That keeps you smiling like you're doing what you do and you're. And you're smiling about it? What's.

Yeah, absolutely. So. Well, I grew up in Ukraine and I had the most traditional childhood and background for Ukraine at that time. So My mom is a schoolteacher teaching math. My dad was in military. And growing up after the Soviet Union fell apart, I was not necessarily dreaming and thinking that going abroad, not even to the US but even to Poland or any closer countries is going to be possible. For that specific reason, I did refuse to learn English because I thought I would never actually have use of that type of skill. All of my focus has been on technology and math and physics and everything that I would be able to apply in my country. But as I go throughout the years I thought that I went to the Technical University of Ukraine, which is one of the best, and then what we typically do in Ukraine. So somewhere along the years, on the third year of me being in college, I decided that it's time for me now to find a job. I came across this position called business analysis or business analyst and I thought it would be something to do with business. And I went to the interview as it always appears. It has not been exactly what I thought it would be. So ultimately what happened? So I went to this American company. I didn't know anything about that the company is going to be American. I didn't know what they do, which was digital commerce platform. I didn't actually even understand what it was. I went there and went through the interview. Somehow magically, with my bare minimum English, I was able to pass interview. That is still a miracle to me to this day how that happened. But this was in college. Yeah, exactly. So that's how I got into kind of this digital commerce platform without knowing what it was. Business analyst job appeared to be nothing actually closer to business. It was all about writing technical requirements for developers so then they can implement features. And at the same time as I was going in the underground from my university to my job, I stumbled upon a book that lots of people were reading at that time. And that book was called Inspired by Marty Kagan. For some people who are in the technology space, they typically know what that book was all about. But it was a really big deal. I was reading that book and in that book the author, Marty Kagan, so he was talking about how he used to work for a company called ebay, which obviously even we knew in Ukraine. And it was a big deal. And how he loved product management and how he was designing products and how he was thinking about what kind of product he can build to change the world and how it was impacting everybody else and how he was lucky that he was able to do that type of job at ebay. What was actually really funny, I remember sitting in this underground, reading this book and thinking how lucky he was that he had a chance to actually do something impactful at ebay. And I had a really clear thought that I would love more than anything one day to work for ebay. And what happened is about, like, a month or two later, the company that I worked for was actually acquired by ebay. And I was like, that cannot be true. Like, it's just cannot be happening. So that's how I started working from not necessarily knowing English, not necessarily understanding that. I got into technology space now working for company acquired by ebay. And I was like, oh, my God, those are all of my dreams that came through. But I still was a business analyst, and it was almost a success until the day that ebay leadership came to us and said, well, we don't really understand what business analysts are and what they do, so therefore, all of you are going to be fired. Because what we do at ebay is product management, not business analysis.

Oh, wow.

And on that day, I was like, oh, my God. Like, you know, this is my dream. I read that book. I had this dream, and like, now it's all gonna go away. So after thinking for maybe a day, I decided to. I don't know where I found the courage, but I decided to put together my thoughts based on that one book that I read. And I was. And I went to the ebay leadership and I said, well, I read this book from Marty Kagan. He worked at ebay. He talks about product management. I can teach myself and everybody else on our team who are business analysts how to do product management. Just give me three months, and then if it doesn't work out, then just fire all of us.

You used. So you used Marty Kagan's book as a. As. As kind of a syllabus for yourself in some ways.

Yeah, exactly.

To lead a team. That's amazing.

Yeah. And. And that's what happened. So they. To my surprise, they. They gave me those three months. I obviously read way more books after that, but. But that's pretty much has been the beginning of my career in product management. And what actually led me to. From. From that moment, start working for American companies. So that ultimately has been my experience, which is not necessarily how typically people start in product management or how they end up working for American companies.

How did you get here from. Or. Or was that the college jump? How did you get from the U.S. yeah. To the U.S. no.

So that was part of the same story. So I, as the company got acquired, and I taught myself how to be A product manager as well as everybody else on my team. After a few years, ebay decided that they wanted to have people who understood our product that they acquired in Ukraine. They wanted those people, or at least some people to be in the US and they offered me and a other people to move to the US and that's actually what got me thankfully to that specific book, that specific moment and that job that I took many years without like truly understanding what the, the work was all about. But that's, that's how my path looked like from coming from Ukraine to, to the US about 10 years ago.

That's amazing. All right, so in the book Inspired, Marty Kagan makes some very great points and he talks about when the, and this is the reason I'm bringing this up is because it was so pivotal for you and it is so foundational for leadership, I think because the Inspired is about bringing tech products to market. But it's so much more than that, right? It's, it's about, it's about leadership principles. Right? People get busy being busy and they're often rewarded for busyness. And one of the things that Marty Kagan says is it should be about your output. It should be about your, your what you produce versus, versus your, Sorry, I said it wrong. It should be about your outcome versus your output. Like that's the busyness is, you know, we're, we're creating this and we're creating that. We're creating this. Well, what are you actually after? Like what's your end result? What's your outcome versus your output? And I love the way that's put right. So, so that's great. I don't expect you to give me a, a full on discourse about, about the book, but there are certain things that come from it that I think are really important. He's, he doesn't say it this way, but it, it resonates with me because I'm a big fan of curiosity. And so he talks about and, and I think that that's been foundational for you as well. You, you know, you would put off learning English and all of a sudden it's like, here's a job, you're moving to America and you've got to do all this stuff and it's like you've got to be in this place of discovery or curiosity in order to, in order to develop something that makes sense for other people. So anything else from that book that you think makes like, has driven you or is allowing you to be so truly customer centric even in the Midst of building these products that are, it's kind of easy for a tech person to get, I would think, to get involved in. Wow, look at how these products integrate versus wow, look at what these products as they integrate what they do for the end user.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Lots of people, especially in technology space, they're being so focused on technology itself that they sometimes forget that they're actually building products for end customers. And most of the time when I work with my team, but also really mindful of the same behavior for myself, is, do we actually understand who the customer will be? And then can we actually name, is it going to be Peter from this company? Is it going to be Ashley from that company? Do we actually know who those people are and what kind of problems or dreams are we like, are we solving a problem for them or enabling them to do something that they have never been able to do before? And then how our technology and technical solution might be an answer to it? But even to your comment about outcomes versus outputs, that's absolutely right as well. There are so many different things that you can be doing in technology space. And there's always news. Especially right now, we're again going through a wave of new technology, new developments, and it's so easy to get yourself busy with integrating this, doing that, trying that LLM or that AI, which sometimes kind of doesn't allow you to see what are you actually solving for and what is your why with that technology and what who are going to be those people and most importantly, what kind of change you're going to create with those products. So those are definitely some of the leadership principles that I took from that book early on. And I feel like because I had that mindset, it helped me understand and actually helped me be more successful in my job because I was not carried away with all the technical details and kind of all of those details that people sometimes get obsessed with, but like always focus on the why. And the more years I've been kind of in the, in this business, the more I worked to remain that clarity and to make sure that I actually pass that clarity to everybody else around me.

When we first spoke, you and I talked about. People first, then process, then product. And that really struck me that, that it's like even in the midst of creating tech, that the idea is it's people first. And you know, I think what you just said also is really important. What product or I'm sorry, what problem are you solving for? What problem are you solving for? And I think again, that as humans, as we wake up in the morning, right. If we had that as the question, what am I doing today? Like, what am I really doing today? It would be so much more meaningful to each of us to know, what are we doing? What is. What is the outcome we're after today versus right. What problem are we solving for today versus all right, what tasks, what tasks do I have to get through? So outcome over output. I love that. And what problem are you solving for People? Product. People process product. Talk about that in terms of how you think and how you sort and how you choose to take on products to work on, what happens for you.

Yeah, absolutely. So over the course of the years, I was thinking about, like, I had to think a lot about how to actually build successful products, because the years passed by, I had more and more responsibility and kind of my decisions would always directly impact the outcome. And there's multiple ways and obviously multiple books are written and lots of articles that you can find on LinkedIn and everywhere else, how people do it. But what I realized at the end of the day, that as a leader, you have to focus on people first. And we're talking about here, the people that you are working together. So who are those people that you're going to be creating this product or this business together? And that is really important because if you don't focus on who they are, what motivates them, do they actually inspired by that outcome that we want to create together? Do they care about those customers for whom you want to create that change? Are you on the same page? Are your values the same? You don't have to work in the same way, but your values and kind of the dreams and the outcomes that you want to achieve have to be aligned. And a lot of leaders kind of, in my experience, and all of us have good leaders around us, and so I'm not that great. So we kind of see how, depending on what kind of leader you are, you actually get different groups of people around you. And that does have a direct impact on the type of product in the company you're going to build at the end. So I had to develop a lot of skills in myself to like, how do I actually inspire people and motivate them and how I not expect everybody to be like me, because that's the easier thing to do where you're like, okay, I know how to do it. So therefore, everybody needs to do it the same way. How do you welcome different opinions, but you're still driven by the same values. The process has been the Second part of this whole thing, and the reason why I put it second, is because, again, there are lots of different books and methodologies on how you build products and how you test them, how you come up with ideas. And sometimes people obsess over, I read this book or I got the certification, and therefore we have to do it this way, because I know so and so told us that and we paid that much money for this process. But ultimately, when we look at now, we have our team of people that with whom we want to change the world. So we have to be choosing processes that work for them, not the other way around. We're like, here is your book, here is your process, then go do that. So I do feel like the leader who is setting the tone and kind of sets that direction of how we're going to be working together needs to first of all, do it collaboratively with the people, but needs to understand what kind of people you have. Are those people driven by the tasks or are those people going to be more creative? What kind of processes are you creating? That's really important. Ultimately, when you combine then your product or your people and your processes, and obviously you have all of those other things that we didn't talk about the why and which customers you're serving for and what kind of change you want to create. Once you have all of that and you're really clear on your people and your processes, then everything that the leader does, at least in product leadership, is enabling those people following those processes to create that product for those customers for that specific why, for that specific industry. I always remind myself of this is what I believe in because it's so easy to start focusing on. I know it's right, or we should do this, or there is a new methodology or there is a new AI and therefore we should be all using this AI because that's what everybody else is doing right now.

Well, you're singing my song, really. By talking about values first and leaders showing up, really explaining what matters to them as leaders, what the work is and why that matters to them, what the company is founded on and why that matters to them. How leaders show up absolutely affects how team members show up. You can't, as a leader, you can't expect other people to have more enthusiasm for something than you do.

Exactly.

Same in parenting. You know, it's sort of like it's not the do as I say, not as I do thing. You've got to be out there modeling it. I love that you use the word enable. It's sometimes overused I think here you've used it really perfectly because leaders, when you have explained what the values are that are really part of who you are, and when you've explained the direction you're heading, you get people aligned with you. And then your job as a leader is actually to reduce friction, to help, to help them to do their jobs. So enabling them to do the thing that you're all setting out to do together, which is great. My. One of my brands is called Exponential Success, and the logo includes a torch with three V's inside of it. And the V's are values, vision and vitality. So it's like, what do you really value? How does that show up the. What's your vision? Can everybody see where you're going? And how do you embody that? What's your vitality around it? How you. How are you bringing what matters to you? This is really great. Yeah, thank you. Oh, it's. I mean, what you're talking about is really great. The, the whole idea of, of platform product management could be really dry. Right? And, and at the same time, what you've done is you've brought this humanity to it because it is about leadership. It's about how you choose to show up. So this is great. What. Talk to me about the book. Like, I don't know a whole lot about what you're writing, so this is. Look how big you're smiling. It's, you know. That's awesome.

Yeah. Well, so I'm writing a book which is going to be published soon, at the beginning of hopefully 2026. But. So this book is going to be giving back pretty much a lot of the knowledge that I have been lucky to gain over the course of the years that I had in my career. And it's all about exactly that idea of the platform product management. The reason why that's important. And we already talked a little bit about platform products, but when we think about how people again create products, most of the time it's another company that creates a product that goes directly to consumer, whether it's going to be an app for meditation or an app for fitness or anything like that. However, in my career, I had to always create those platforms where there is a work that we do as a company to create this kind of fundamental platform. And then we obviously tailor the customer, but then we also create a space for others, for external developers and partners, and just in general businesses around the world to add additional value. So, for example, when you put it in perspective with digital commerce, we would create a platform that serves, let's say, American market, but the same platform can actually serve Europe, but there's going to be different payment methods and different tax and shipping methods. So I know we as a company cannot create everything for all the markets that are available out there, but we can allow partners and developers to go and create those additional capabilities, and therefore, we go to business successfully and we can serve more customers. Going back to my book, all of those lessons of how to do it and what works, what doesn't and what doesn't work, and then even the fact that this whole kind of platform product management is a specific thing I had to learn based on many, many mistakes and a little bit of the guidance from people who understood it naturally, that I was lucky to work with. So I was speaking at many conferences, kind of sharing my experience, and many people asked, like, if it would be so nice to read more about it. So it's been about, like two years of work, and I finally happy that it's coming all together and I will be able to pass this knowledge to others so then more people can create those platform products and hopefully avoid the mistakes that I had to make early on in order to learn this, in order to gain this whole knowledge.

Amazing. That's so great. So, two questions. One is, is there something I left out in asking you all these questions? Is there something that you were hoping we'd cover that we haven't covered? And question number two is, if people want to learn more about you and your book, how do they reach out to you? Is that through LinkedIn or do you have a different preference?

So LinkedIn is obviously the easiest way. It's Elena Leonova, and I have a Ukrainian flag next to my name, so that's how people can easily find. And then from there, there's all the links to my personal website and to the product that I'm building for technology executives that is going to help them be more strategic. So I would love to meet new people. Always happy to connect with other people who are on a similar journey or maybe not as much. But in terms of the things that I was hoping to cover, I think there's always a lot of things and lots of lessons to share on what to do and what not to. The only other thing that I was thinking as I was preparing for this podcast, is one of the things that one of the leadership lessons that stood up with me, which I feel like would be great to share with the audience, is as leaders, we are always like when we have new people who join our teams and we are the leaders who are going to be working with those people. It's so easy to treat people so well, like when they just joined the company and everybody always so excited about growing the team and having new team members. But one of my previous managers once told me that how you treat people when they leave your team or your company or your product, how you treat those people who leave actually tells more about what kind of leader you are than how you treat them when they join. That stood up with me and stuck with me for life, which I think is a really important lesson, because we always have those lessons of if somebody works with you, treat them this way or motivate them this way. But when they leave, the story ends. But I think it shouldn't. And there's so much that we can be doing and helping people. And whether they go for better opportunity or whether I know you have to let them go or whatever happens, how you treat them is going to define what type of leader you are and it's going to absolutely impact your leadership journey and what kind of people you're going to have around you.

I think that's great because it implies that you're thinking about them the whole way through.

Exactly.

And I love that. I think that's so important. Really great. Anything else?

No, I think that would be it. Well, thank you so much again for that conversation. I hope that there were something interesting for your audience.

There's some great nuggets in there. I loved it. I loved it. All right, so Elena E L E N A Leonova. L E O N O V A Elena Leonova with the Ukrainian flag on her LinkedIn profile. That's how you find out more. And her book is going to be out there and so take a look. For that, I thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much.

Okay, this is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. My guest today, Elena Leonova. I am your host, Dr. Wayne Purnell, host, guide and coach on this journey. We will see you here and next time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. For more information, please go to onesharpsword.com.